ENFIELD – Over the past 10 years, Great Auk Wireless has been slowly expanding its network and services to bring high speed Internet service to residents of rural towns in New England, and is now competing with larger companies to provide a competitively priced alternative in urban areas across the region.

Remote areas benefit from small transmitter

EASTHAMPTON – One of the unique features of Great Auk Wireless’ expansion strategy is the use of a small, low profile transmitter device called a Reconex.

The device is a miniature version of larger tower transmitters and works as a repeater of the network signal.

In areas that have trouble receiving a tower signal, because of distance or geography, GAW has found customers willing to allow them to install the Reconex on a home or building, enabling them to increase the signal’s strength and extend it to new neighborhoods.

In Easthampton, for instance, company co-founder Josh Garza estimated along with the two towers in use by GAW, there were as many as 20 Reconex repeaters that had been installed, allowing the network to hop locally farm house to house, neighborhood to neighborhood, without the need for building more large unsightly towers. Garza emphasized and praised the level of local collaboration in getting Great Auk Wireless up and running, and the commitment the company has to local communities.

With every expansion into a new town, GAW representatives convene community meetings with residents to describe their services and gauge the level of interest. These meetings have been integral to the company’s steady expansion.

“We have been happy to work with our customers and their communities to make this service possible,” he said.

– BRIAN ROGERS

Great Auk Wireless, or GAW, was founded in 2002 to provide service for residents in rural areas of Vermont who lacked access to high-speed Internet commonly available in densely populated areas.

Today, Enfield-based GAW has expanded to provide digital Internet, television and phone service on its wireless network to more than 30,000 customers, serving a growing list of rural areas – including the Valley – and moving into urban centers as a competitively priced alternative to the region’s other high-speed cable and DSL providers.

Despite the stiff competition, which consists mainly of large national providers like Verizon and Comcast, GAW has managed to stake out a piece of the market by providing a collection of services that cater to local network needs.

The company was started by Josh Garza and Nick Huanca, co-founders of Optima Computers, a sales and service retailer based in Brattleboro, Vt. The company’s namesake, an extinct cousin of the penguin, was the suggestion of a friend of Garza’s, who adopted it even though it had no relation to the company’s mission. The two realized that there was a growing demand for the Internet in Vermont’s small towns, where the fastest – and only – existing communications infrastructure was still the telephone line. They decided the answer to the problem lay in wireless technology.

At the initial test site in Salisbury, Vt., Garza created a wireless network around Lake Dunmore, providing Internet access to campground visitors in an area too distant from existing infrastructure to be of interest to other providers. The project was a success, increasing the value and desirability of the campground by allowing vacationers to surf the web. “This was really neat,” Garza said, and he wondered if it might be feasible on a larger scale.

Word spread about the project and Garza began getting calls from other far-flung communities that were without high-speed Internet. With the help of local town officials, GAW set up transmitters in these communities and began signing people up for their service.

State officials soon began facilitating the expansion of GAW to areas lacking access.

“We did a lot of work with the state of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts,” he said.

To effectively install their equipment, Garza searched for a high, unobstructed area where a transmitter could be attached to an existing structure or a transmitter tower in use by other companies. In some areas, he noticed that several other wireless network companies had all installed individual equipment, and he realized it would be more efficient if they operated together, not separately.

At a meeting with these companies, his message of joining forces was generally thought to be a good move, but logistically it never got off the ground. Instead, GAW decided to buy the companies out.

“We ended up buying about 12 wireless providers in New England,” he said.

This helped GAW scale up, offering more speed and better coverage. Today, the company’s coverage area includes portions of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire. GAW offers to bundle TV, Internet, and phone service for under $70, roughly equal to Comcast’s price for the same bundle, and $20 cheaper than Verizon’s Fios bundle option.

In Massachusetts, GAW worked with the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, an organization created by Gov. Deval Patrick to close the digital divide by connecting the state’s rural towns to high speed Internet. The state took the initiative on what it calls the “middle mile” by undertaking the building of a broadband cable backbone that private companies could use to extend services to communities in the “last mile”– the many underserved rural towns in the western part of the state.

Along with several other small Internet service providers, GAW received grant money in July from the state to be used to this end. Judy Dumont, who heads the Massachusetts Broadband Institute, was eager to include GAW in the state’s efforts to connect communities.

“It’s our mission to use both state funds and the federal funds that were granted to us to build the necessary infrastructure to lower the economic hurdles for companies like GAW that seek to provide these services,” she said.

MassBroadband 123, the official name of the state’s cable backbone project, was offered as an open network for any company to use, which made it possible for small companies like GAW, and many others, who wouldn’t otherwise have the capital to construct such large scale infrastructure.

“It was truly the definition of a public-private partnership,” Dumont said.

In addition to its efforts in rural areas, GAW had also been getting calls from residents of urban areas where only one option existed for high-speed cable service. The expansion allowed GAW to provide its service at a lower cost than the existing cable providers in the once competition-free area. Still, the larger cable providers held an advantage over GAW in their array of offerings. Cable Internet was often bundled with phone and television service. By offering bundling deals, consumers were discouraged from switching Internet service alone, even if they were dissatisfied with it. If a customer threatened to switch, cable companies often offered special discounts to avoid losing business.

In response to this, GAW bought a phone company and worked out a deal with directive, allowing it to provide the same array of services as the meager companies.